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Heading into Thursday night’s NFC matchup between the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants, both teams were 1-2 and both fanbases were already frustrated with their start to the season.
That didn’t stop America from tuning in. The game, exclusive to Amazon Prime Video, shattered the record for the most-streamed NFL regular season game ever.
Amazon says it averaged 16.22 million viewers for its Thursday Night Football stream of Dallas’s 20-15 win, according to Nielsen’s Panel Only measurement.
That topped by 6% the Amazon stream of Cowboys-Seahawks on Nov. 30, 2023, which averaged 15.26 million viewers.
A Nielsen update Monday morning increased the audience estimate to 17.61 million.
It is not the most-streamed NFL game ever; that title belongs to NBCUniversal’s Peacock stream of the Chiefs-Dolphins Wild Card playoff game, which was the most-streamed NFL game of any kind, averaging 23 million viewers.
With its record-setting performance, Jeff Bezos’s tech giant may be putting to bed the notion that tech streamers can’t attract broadcast-sized audiences for the biggest live games.
Amazon is getting closer to matching NFL broadcast audiences. During the first three weeks of the 2024 season, NFL games averaged 18.6 million viewers across TV/digital, up 10% vs. the same period last year. Over its first three games, TNF on Amazon is averaging 14.88 million viewers, up 25% from last season’s comparable first-three-games average of 11.86 million.
The Cowboys rank right behind the Chiefs as the second-most-popular TV draw this season. The combination of a tight game, two national fan bases, and the country’s largest TV market in the Big Apple, helped drive Amazon’s record-setting night.
The stream of Cowboys-Giants attracted a peak audience of 18.10 million viewers between 9:15 and 9:30 pm ET. That was the largest peak audience ever for TNF. It’s the second time in three weeks that TNF’s game coverage has peaked at 18 million viewers or more.
Meanwhile, Amazon Prime’s studio show, TNF Tonight, is averaging 1.77 million viewers over the first three games, up 27% from last year’s 1.39 million. TNF Nightcap, the streamer’s post-game studio show, is averaging 2.04 million viewers, up 10%
As with last season, TNF is also drawing a younger TV audience—roughly seven years younger this season than those watching NFL games on linear TV networks. The median age is 47.6 years old vs. 54.5 for NFL game viewers on CBS, NBC, Fox and ESPN.
